Today I was checking RareWares' links page to find broken links, and happened upon Xiph's page. I noticed the "news" there were 3-4 years old.

So I was wondering, does anyone, by any chance, know what is going on there? Are they working on Vorbis2, or Tarkin, or Theora? Have they disbanded and only the web pages remain? I remember that in Emmett's time, he would feed us news non-stop, mostly from #vorbis (he was a little too loud, matter of factly :B). Now, we listen nothing but crickets.

Do we have some insider here that knows if something is going on there, at all? Maybe Coalson or Valin?

And what the hell is Emmett up to anyway?

Thanks for any info.

R.

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Get up-to-date binaries of Lame, AAC, Vorbis and much more at RareWares:http://www.rarewares.org

I don't know if this has been mentioned already but it looks quite likely that at least Mozilla and Opera will support Ogg Theora and Vorbis for the suggest "audio" and "video" tags in HTML5.

Apple's pushing for AAC/H.264 and it might turn out that the HTML5 standard doesn't specify a codec. But if they also package up a drop in replacement for older/non-conforming browsers (for example, using the Cortado Java Applets) then this could be a real goer. (Part of the idea of HTML5 is to remain backwards compatible with IE as much as possible, even if it means using fancey javascript tricks to patch up the differences for non-compliant browsers. I've never heard them promote Java as a way of doing this but i think it makes sense in the realm of video and audio).

That would mean native support on Mozilla and derivatives, Opera (including probably the Wii, maybe the Nintendo DS and several smart phones). It's interesting to note that the Wii browser only supports Flash 7 because Adobe doesn't provide a newer SDK, so only Adobe's supported platforms get the newer code.

I'd assume that Apple would use Quicktime so Ogg support should be a plugin away.

Wikipedia's already signed up to use the format regardless. I'd imagine the BBC and other national broadcast types would jump at the chance to use a real browser standard rather that a mishmash of Real/WMA/Quicktime.

One of the Google employees that works on HTML5 seemed to be hinting that Youtube would switch too.

Flash video came from nowhere because it filled a real need, I can see Ogg Theora doing the same, and bringing Ogg Vorbis support with it.